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plasma cutter tracer (new)

ATTENTION! ALL METAL ARTISTS AND FABRICATORS!!! i have designed and built a prototype plasma cutter tracer for artists and fabricators alike, using only a cheap berlan from ebay and pt31 torch,

and would like any feedback as i may put it into prodution or just sell the plans in the near future. thanks for looking, hope to hear some of your thoughts. Here are some of the items i have cut with it. These are not cut with a cnc machine,or have any motoriside parts or any elastictrickery apart from the torch itself. they are all on a4 paper, but the machine table has a work area of 800mm X 800mm. cheers Dave

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Your pcs. look nice but with out seeing the machine/setup I can't give you any more feedback.

believe me i would love to show you the machine, but its been a while in development getting the right combination of ideas to work correctly together, and as its still only in prototype stage with no patent as yet, i'd be a fool to let the world and his daughter in on it. Im sure you can understand my secrecy. what i can tell you is its a very simple idea with few moving parts and easy to use (i'm by no means an artist) but the picture of marilyn i just printed from internet, then 10 minutes later she was done. i would say you could make around five copies of it from the same printout,then just reprint and youre away again. you can also use a pre cut template if you wish to make many repeated parts.

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Optical tracers, scanned images, etc have been done to death. Very good stuff already out there already, so unless your has a good gimmick, or is dirt cheap, then it is just another in the long line. Not sayin it is not a good idea, just don't know.

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and as its still only in prototype stage with no patent as yet, i'd be a fool to let the world and his daughter in on it. Im sure you can understand my secrecy. what i can tell you is its a very simple idea with few moving parts and easy to use [ATTACH]31195[/ATTACH]

Have you checked your concept in a preliminary patent search to determine if you have a truly new idea or is an idea already covered by prior patents?

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I can do the same thing with a used overhead projector and a small pic of the subject. Just need to make poster board cutouts of the pieces, cut em out, trace em out and cut. Total cost, about $20 for the projector and .$0.50 for the poster board. Once I have a pattern, it's just busy work.

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I can do the same thing with a used overhead projector and a small pic of the subject. Just need to make poster board cutouts of the pieces, cut em out, trace em out and cut. Total cost, about $20 for the projector and .$0.50 for the poster board. Once I have a pattern, it's just busy work.

I've started doing pretty much the same thing..

I have a dark room enlarger I bought many years ago and has seen seldom use.. I find images I like, scale them to the 2 3/4" x 2 3/4" enlarger negative size, print the image on transparency film (normally used for presentations) with my laser printer. I use that as the negative in the enlarger and project the image onto the steel plate the size I want.

I found on a metal artists forum that aluminum or gold color sharpie pens are commonly used to trace the patterns onto the steel plate.. Just follow the image from the enlarger with the sharpie pen then cut it out..

Could not believe how good the first one a "man in the moon" turned out...

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Optical tracers, scanned images, etc have been done to death. Very good stuff already out there already, so unless your has a good gimmick, or is dirt cheap, then it is just another in the long line. Not sayin it is not a good idea, just don't know.

as ive pointed out, it has no electrical parts apart from the torch itself, so no optical tracers or anything using computers apart from me printing an image from the interweb. the only thing similar to it is the 'torchemate' and 'rotten leonard' in that it uses the age old swinging arm around a fixed turret, but thats where the similarity ends. hope this helps!

dave

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I can do the same thing with a used overhead projector and a small pic of the subject. Just need to make poster board cutouts of the pieces, cut em out, trace em out and cut. Total cost, about $20 for the projector and .$0.50 for the poster board. Once I have a pattern, it's just busy work.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]31196[/ATTACH]

looks very good dude!

mine you can use free hand (ideal for artists with a vision, because you dont need goggles as you can't actually see the the cut as you draw) or use straight from a picture (no cutting out needed) or as you do pre cut a template.